The original expert system in chemistry was the DENDRAL program
that made scientific discoveries subsequently published in prestigious
journals. The more recent MECHEM program continues the DENDRAL
tradition by contributing new computational and architectural strategies
in machine chemistry that yield valuable applications within industrial
chemistry and that have advanced developments in the theory of artificial
intelligence approaches to scientific discovery in general.

THE MECHEM SYSTEM: OVERVIEW

Valdés-Pérez ( 1995a) describes theory, results, and implications of the
MECHEM program in the following summary account:

Earlier we proposed an idea conjecturing unseen entities in science, and described its application within MECHEM to the chemistry task of inferring the
mechanism of a chemical reaction based on experimental evidence. However,
the program was a prototype, and lacked several capabilities that rendered it
incompetent on current science.

We now describe extensions that enable reasoning about the molecular struc-

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